Whiplash USA

An entire civilization has given birth to something that stands in stark contrast to itself. It gazes on in fear and confusion; it attempts its old methods of power exercise on the new generation, old procedures that have long become obsolete in a changing world that has made the civilization irrelevant.

They are creatures who employ 2 dimensional thought in an emerging 3 dimensional discourse. They are dying and through their fear they are clutching their wayward convictions in insane desperation.

It is up to the youth to embark on the unsavory task of prying the old tyrants' cold dead fingers off of what was once theirs.

It is all slipping through their fingers and though they can tighten their grasp, it grows old and cold and weak. The question is: do we have the stomach to touch the dead? Will we have to touch at all? Or can we let it fade? Hard to say.

Free enterprise? Free markets? No men are free when all men are completely free. Power has a tendency to collect and crystallize and then you have an oligarchy all over again.

The bully makes friends with the other bullies and soon you have asymmetric power relations...all over again.

The rich get richer and as the system grows more top heavy we see social strife, infrastructure rot, insanity, the struggle of the damned to collect the table scraps, a macabre procession of warring men reduced to animals...fighting for illusory salvation in the name of civilization.

The past has past because it is past. And now is the first step to the next.

Can we save it? Or must we let it fall?

An Instance of Discomfort

I woke up this morning with a twisted, aching back, and the overwhelming feeling of being infiltrated by insects.

This wasn't an inexplicable feeling either. I went to bed last night under the impression that I was covered in ants. I wasn't actually covered, I think. I think it was just my arm and leg hairs being...jostled...as I moved under the cover. But I was still tripping out because of all the ants that have been around. Fuckin' ants man. They've been literally all over the place this season.

You leave out a tiny grain of obliterated shitgruel and all of a sudden the entire colony is swarming upon it. They must be really desperate. If you blow on them or anything they absolutely trip out. It must suck being an ant. I usually try to avoid killing ants. I blow them away, which must really mess with their poor little heads.

They travel in well-ordered lines. Everything is very linear and interconnected. One ant is always in front of the other. Then you blow one out into the far reaches of space and then what does he do? He wanders around in loops on a great alien plane of marble for eternity, as far as I'm concerned. It's too bad they have to be such a nuisance.

Raid is an absolute killer too. I've seen it sprayed on them. They instantly shrivel up at the epicenter, and then the rest in proximity start writhing on their backs and it's very hideous. I am pretty convinced they feel their own world of pain and sorrow in a relative way.

I still haven't solved my moral dilemma on killing, or where to draw the line between what truly lives in a conscious way. If I had my way I wouldn't kill anything, just to be sure. But the problem is that we exist as displacements in a world that is universally living. So there is always going to be a point at which we have to occupy the space we are meant to occupy, possibly denying that space to something else that seeks it.

That is a problem for another day. The whole point of this post is to provide an outlet for an absolutely miserable dream I had last night, vaguely connected to the ants on my body phenomenon. It has to be connected, because I went to sleep feeling that way.

In the dream, I was back in my room at my Dad's old house, but it wasn't my room really, it was the ruins of my room, where the room itself had become a sort of backyard terrace.

I was munching on a sandwich and I began inspecting it because I suspected that the jelly that was on it had turned to ketchup. Suddenly, I noticed a strange ribbed surface at the end of the sandwich, and realized that a huge cockroach was actually baked into the bread. The feet and antennae were hanging out of it and everything. I held the sandwich out in horror and my Dad yelled, "Aw that's disgusting!" Then there were baby cockroaches swarming my room, darting every which way, so I suspected the damned baked cockroach had laid eggs in a sort of bizarre Trojan horse maneuver.

That's why I woke up feeling invaded by insects. The bastards were everywhere, even deep in my psyche. All morning I had this unshakable feeling of dirtiness. Sandwiches are going to be a hell of a lot of fun eating now.

I mean, I understand dreams are a way of consolidating information and organizing everything into a digestible construct (or so we currently believe), but really come on. It doesn't have to come up with dreams like this. Really.

Fuckin' bugs man.

When Life Gives You Icebergs

Attempt a picnic on a sinking ship.